FAQ

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Fuckin' mergers - how do THEY work?

A
few people have asked me over the last few weeks if I had any thoughts
about the SM/Woollim merger. If you're one of those three people, this
post is for you. If not, I'll try and make it entertaining enough that
you don't fall asleep while reading it, although if you feel the need to
slice open the veins on your forearm and pour caffeine directly into
the gaping wound just to keep your eyes open during this shit, I won't
blame you. I certainly melted down and mainlined a bunch of Cadburys
just to write this.
I'll start by mentioning that k-pop fans love
telling both idols and record labels how to run their shit. This is
truly fuckin' hilarious to me, and I'll never fully understand why they
bother. I guess these people go on forums and articles just for
stroking their own egos and feeling reinforcement of their pre-existing
opinions rather than for actually learning any fresh information
(besides what colour their bias painted their toenails this week) or,
heaven fucking forbid, improving their mental processes. When complex
and nuanced issues like industry mergers, lineup changes, lawsuits etc
come up, you've got masses of extremely derpy and unqualified people who
mostly don't even fucking know what half the shit entails telling
people with decades of experience in the music business that "it will
all be okay as long as everyone involved does what I say they should
do". You can't possibly imagine how much of a joke these people look
like to someone actually in the industry.

Of course, point this out to them, and the advice goes down quicker than a Sacha Grey audition tape:

That's
my reply to a question thread in Onehallyu, and the red box contains my
downvotes. Collecting more than a couple downvotes for a single
comment on Onehallyu is actually quite tricky unless you're a completely
obvious troll, so I'm impressed that I managed to achieve this result
with nothing more than my sincere and honest opinion.

The reason
why I bring this up (besides that it obviously amuses me to do so
because I'm a cunt) is to explain why I'm not tackling the issue of the
SM/Woollim merger from the angle of "do I think it's a good idea", or
"did SM do the right thing" or even "did Woollim do the right thing".
I'm not on the inside of the situation so I don't know how things played
out, so if I started casting judgement and saying "company [x] should
[y] because I KNOW WHAT'S BEST" this would make me as stupid as the
derps who "knew" that T-ara were bullies and that Tablo got his degree
from Kinkos. What I can do however, is tell you how mergers like this
do typically play out in the industry, and put you in the shoes of
someone who would actually say yes to a merger to help you understand
some of the factors that may influence the decision, and I'm going to do
it with one of my quasi-fanfiction "scenarios". You love my scenarios,
yes you do.

So "chin up", everyone,and picture this:

You're
a moderately-successful Korean male singer in your 30s. You're
conscious that you're actually pretty close to JYP's age, and while
you're not as ugly as him yet, you know that it's only a matter of time,
and there's only so much surgeons can do. You're certainly no dummy -
in an industry dominated by appearances and image, you know that even
with the help of the best clinics in Gangnam, your days in the limelight
are numbered in triple digits at best.

It's
okay though, you're not bitter. By any objective standards, you've had
a good run while it lasted. In an industry where most stars vanish
almost as quickly as they appear, you've managed to sustain a career for
over a decade - no small feat. However, most of your money went back
into the company who had signed you up and you don't have much to show
for it all financially. Looking at the situation gets you thinking
about your future: wouldn't it be a lot nicer to be the person on the
other end of that contract, collecting the money and deciding where it
goes, rather than just getting piecemeal sums for all your efforts?
With this thought in mind you take out loans from some sympathetic
investors, start your own k-pop label "Open Goatse Entertainment" and
begin scouting for some hot new talent to groom.

Three years go
by, and you've got yourself and your staff at OG Entertainment a nice
office, a recording studio, a dorm and a place to rehearse your new
groups. You've also gotten yourself heavily into debt because you had
to take out multiple loans for all this shit from friends, parents,
banks and everywhere else you can think of, and you haven't started
actually making money because your groups haven't even debuted yet.
Most of your staff are working without a wage and have second jobs just
to make rent, but you're confident in the abilities of your new boy
group CUMRAG (Choreographed Underaged Males Reawakening Antipathetic
Girls) to bring in the revenue once they debut - they're pretty tight
musically and they're certainly hits with the ladies in the office who
assure you that they "have lots of potential, especially that one,
what's his number I lost it out of my phone". You've also groomed up
girl group SPUNKMOP (Symbolic Prostitution Usurping Naive Korean Men Of
Paychecks) but you're not sure how well they'll do - you mainly just
started them up because it makes your label's portfolio look more
"rounded" to also have a girl group, and you figure it's better to have
girls in the building than to not have girls in the building. After all
what's the point of being a label boss if you can't be around pretty
girls? Also it's good to have people around who can do guest spots on
the boy group's ballads that you don't have to pay extra for.

Debut
time for CUMRAG rolls around, and the pressure mounts. Two thousand
physical copies of their debut mini-album THIS IS CUMRAG are pressed and
printed, and spots are booked on all the major music shows for the
group to perform. You and all your staff cross their fingers and hope
that feature track "Romantic Towel" does the business...

Then something absolutely fucking terrible happens. The group becomes a massive monster hit.

The
group is received enormously well, far beyond your expectations. THIS
IS CUMRAG sells out its initial physical run in less than two days.
There's demand to make more, but you can't afford it right away - you've
already taken out your umpteenth fucking loan just to get this far, and
shovelling the meager amount of money from the first pressing and the
first few digital sales straight back into the expenses of more product
production is the very last thing you wanted to do with the money when
you've got masses of debt plus unpaid staff who've been working for you
diligently for years in the hope of a payoff... but what choice do you
have? Also, now there's a demand for merchandise that you'd be crazy
not to fulfill... so you hire a company to make up posters and other
crap, once again with borrowed money. To make matters worse, the first
cray-cray fangirls have tracked down your company and are starting to
saesang their oppas and slide their menstrual pads under the dorm
doors... you'll need to rethink building security, you weren't prepared
for this bullshit. Catering to all this sudden success before you're
financially ready is ironically actually threatening to bankrupt you
completely - why couldn't the group have gotten successful gradually?

Fortunately
for you, as the success of CUMRAG has gone national, the banks don't
mind throwing more money at you, knowing that they're going to get it
all back eventually (plus interest)... but each turn from the group just
generates more success, which means more loans to pay for it, just when
you thought the loans were ending. Follow-up album "FEEL OUR CUMRAG"
with its smooth feature track "Absorbing Our Love" sells out of its
initial run of 10,000 physical units even quicker than the debut album,
and every dollar you spend generates another ten dollars worth of
demand, but to fulfill this demand, you need to spend more money and
more time on continually expanding the business. On top of this,
everything around organising this shit is becoming far more work
than you ever anticipated. You have to oversee not just music
production, artist training, choreographers, stylists, media liaison,
schedules, manufacturing deals, distribution deals and video product,
but also rent, cleaners, coffee machine filter changes, office supplies,
vehicles, bills, plumbing, workplace arguments and whoever keeps
stealing the milk from the fridge. Whatever happened to just sitting
back and collecting the money like you had planned? It didn't seem this
hard for your boss back when it was you who was the singer. Due to all
this you've been pulling 22-hour days for weeks straight and your
partner has become a stranger, you barely see her and she's also getting
a bit fed up with you bringing work home. She tells you one day only
semi-jokingly that she may as well move out and take the kids and you
don't even have time to talk about it with her because you have to field
CUMRAG's love calls from sponsors after they were just on some shitty
variety show that you can't remember the name of because the office
phone is diverting to your mobile after hours. Meanwhile, your girl
group SPUNKMOP has been languishing doing very little, simply because
you haven't have the time to spend with them or the infrastructure to
support them, your still-tiny label has had to devote just about every
scrap of available energy and manpower to maintaining CUMRAG, so they're
on the backburner for now, and they don't mind telling your staff
exactly how they feel about it. A dorm full of broke and pissed-off
girls jealously eyeing off their labelmates' success and pestering you
about "their turn" is the absolute last thing you need right now on top
of all this other shit.

Then
one day, you receive a phone call from a much larger rival company,
HappyEnding Entertainment. They say that they like CUMRAG and want to
discuss a mutually beneficial business deal. Intrigued, you arrange a
meeting.

In the boardroom, the guys from HE Entertainment are adamant -"HappyEnding needs a CUMRAG, and we'd like to use yours."

"But what about my Open Goatse?", you ask.

"We
realise that your artist is becoming a relevant market force and we'd
be willing to buy out Open Goatse completely. We'd rather work with the
market strength of CUMRAG rather than compete against it."

You
object "I want creative control over my artist, I refuse to give them
up, I didn't put in all this work for you to just take CUMRAG and make
them just like your other acts. No offense but they probably did so
well partly because they are a little bit different. Nobody at
HappyEnding would take a chance on a feature track like 'Romantic
Towel!'"

"You would relinquish the CEO position but you would
still be in charge of CUMRAG, in a management oversight role, with a
generous performance-based salary. Open Goatse would still exist but as
an "imprint", your own "brand" within HappyEnding, if you will, to
release these acts and any future ones that you recruit. You would take
care of all the decisions concerning the releases of those artists,
essentially nothing would change for you in the creative area, you would
maintain full creative control. You would also have the benefit that
you can now use our existing well-established infrastructure to promote
and make product, as well as having your artists become featured on our
touring circuits and events. Using our infrastructure also means that a
lot of the more boring jobs will become stuff that you won't need to
think about anymore, because we already have people for that. You can
concentrate your energy on the things that matter to you most - grooming
and directing your artists, and lightening the load might help you
devote more energy to SPUNKMOP."

"I'll... have to think about it"

"Oh,
and if you've accumulated any debts in your business processes thus
far, we'll pay those off in full, on top of whatever price we mutually
negotiate for the sale of your label."

"Look, it sounds great, but I need to talk to my lawyer first..."

"And
you can move your artists into our nice new dormitories where we have a
specially-trained anti-saesang security detail that beats unsanitary
trespassing fangirls to a pulp."

You reach for a pen to sign that contract so fast that you nearly bore a hole right through your fucking hand.

Anyway
I hope this explains mergers somewhat, although I did gloss over a few
things and focus on others instead for the sake of entertainment,
because some details just aren't that interesting to read about. If you've got questions, or you feel like I've left anything out that you're curious about, feel free to ask.

Of course, it's not "rose coloured glasses" by any stretch. For a big company to buy out a small one, the small one obviously isn't going to say yes unless the big company has put something really good on the table, and the scenario I painted is honest overview of what a typical merger deal looks like.

Why do I get the feel that SPUNKMOP was based off 2NE1? Because seriously, YG don't give two fucks about 2NE1 XD

*ahem* Glad you took the time to write this article. I was doing some generous side-eyeing of the SM/Woollim merger when I first heard the news, but I'm over that shit. I'm also over stupid fangirls screaming their heads off that SM is going to ruin their precious INFINITE oppas (if that song Inconvenient Truth hadn't already ;3); I don't think SM is that stupid. Just my two cents.

I guess that if CUMRAG is Infinite, then SPUNKMOP would be D-Unit. Come to think of it, "D-Unit" is easily as suggestive a name as "SPUNKMOP", which just goes to show that reality is stranger than fiction.

I was going to copy and paste a few bits of ranting by fangirls about how they were worried about the merger being the end of their precious Infinite but I didn't because it just seemed like too much trouble. Like you I'm sure most folks have seen that stuff anyway.

i think your explanation and trollim_ent's are the best out therehttps://twitter.com/trollim_ent/status/365714328466370560/photo/1i wonder why fans are complaining while it's clearly a good deal for parties involved, it's not like anyone was held at gunpoint when signing it anyway. And if it means Nell might come to my country, i'm down with it

yeah that was what i was wondering about nell, too- what the fuck would they do playing counting pulses at the primarily yes-your-oppa-loves-u-fanserviseu fest that is smtown

tbh something about even infinite's major songs (btd/paradise/chaser, even be mine) in the middle of all the sorry sorrys and ring ding dongs of the world feels a little awkward. tasty is the only woollim group that could even kind of fit in

hooray for my fave group Nell.However stating " if I had any thoughts about the SM/Woollim merger" is misleading...I did a quick search and it's s subsidiary of SME, not the whole company.PHEW, was stunned fir a minute there.PHEW!

SM C&C is part of SM Entertainment, it's a subsidiary. It's still an SM/Woollim merger because Woollim is being sucked up into the SM business machinery. Exactly which part of that machinery is devoted to Woollim isn't really something that I thought was relevant.

This whole article had the Kpopalypse vibe bleeding through the lines. The names were also gold, but as an American I can't say the term "spunky" hasn't been ruined for me already. :( Love the ICP reference.

I had to ask wikipedia who Woollim Entertainment are.I think I've never heard a single song from any of the people on the lists, so I couldn't care less what happens to them. And I only remember having heard Epic high (fuck their misspelling) before.

there is actually a major label in japan called peace and smile and i cringe every time i hear about it

also i really hope infinite gets better dorm facilities and stuff out of this deal cause shit they only have a tv because they won it somewhere, and this is the *~new and improved deluxe kawaii world~* dorm that they only got after they won first place. no wonder everyone was bawling on stage like a bunch of PoWs

Not gonna lie I cried buckets and buckets of salty fan girl tears when I learned my precious Infinite oppars had falling into SM's satanic clutches but then I realized I actually don't give two fucks about Infinite and only want to ride Hoya's face while L watches and does that thing he does with his tongue.